Sessions at Open Source Bridge 2010 about Open Source with notes

Tuesday 1st June 2010

Email had Sendmail, and the Web itself had Apache. Open Source software has been instrumental in the development of every revolutionary communications technology on the Internet. In this talk, StatusNet founder Evan Prodromou will discuss the state of the open social web and how projects like StatusNet, Elgg, WordPress, and Drupal are working to make a distributed and open social network across the Internet. He’ll discuss security standards like OpenID and OAuth, as well as real-time publishing systems like PubSubHubbub and Salmon, data structures like Activity Streams as well as application suites like OStatus.

With millions of users signing on daily to access their favorite social media services – be it Twitter, Facebook or Digg – a developer’s worst fear is not having the backend support to house and access to such huge amounts of related data.

Industry efforts to architect next-generation databases that can scale massively by pairing open source databases and content management technologies with cloud-computing are underway. The door is also opening to a whole new world of user benefits which will be made possible by access to data -- cross-cloud -- in non-proprietary databases and content management systems.

The Apache Cassandra Project and Drizzle are open alternatives to traditional databases that offer new opportunities by using cloud computing to improve performance. Both are going to change the way we think about databases for the next few decades. And, from the content management side Drupal has become the ‘go-to’ open source software for the publication and management of website content.

In this session, Jonathan Bryce, co-founder of The Rackspace Cloud, will discuss the recent movement – from both developer and vendor – for open cloud initiatives, while also addressing:

A basic overview of Cassandra, Drizzle and Drupal with case scenarios for each

The unique ways cloud providers are working with open database projects to maximize user experience

Traditional, distributed and non-relational databases

Enhancing site scale and performance by taking advantage of cloud-based file storage/CDN

Wednesday 2nd June 2010

Unlike most areas of enterprise IT, open source solutions in the storage industry have remained in the background. In 2010 this situation is going to change dramatically with new open source storage solutions, nex-generation Linux file systems, and emerging cloud offerings making significant inroads. This session will outline the areas where open source storage solutions are well-suited to the enterprise and best practices for implementation. It will explore how open source will play a key role in the adoption of storage virtualization and cloud storage. Also discussed will be the pros and cons of new technologies (highlighting the areas that will have the most impact), and best practices learned from a real-life deployment of a scalable NAS deployment in the healthcare industry.

From creating remote-sensing CubeSats to analyzing aerogel: how the public is hacking into open source space exploration.

As technology shifts from a means of passive consumption to active creation, people are collaborating on a massive scale. The endeavor of Spacehack.org is to transform that into more of a community, so that space hackers can easily connect and interact.

Amateurs were once considered to be at the crux of scientific discovery, but over time have been put on the sidelines. Despite this, citizen science is witnessing a renaissance. Agencies such as NASA no longer have a monopoly on the global space program and more participatory projects are coming to life to harness the power of open collaboration around exploring space on a faster schedule.

Instead of complaining about where our jetpack is, we can now demand to figure out how to take an elevator to space . And, while you still can’t own a CubeSat as easily as an iPod, you can join a SEDSAT-2 team and learn how to engineer one.

There’s also GalaxyZoo , which opened up a data set containing a million galaxies imaged by a robotic telescope. Why projects such as these are important is because robots are actually kind of dumb. Humans are able to make classifications that well-programmed machines can’t. Currently, 200,000 humans are identifying over 250,000 galaxies.

If tinkering with spacecrafts is more your speed, the Google Lunar X PRIZE is a competition to send robots to the moon. However, you don’t need to be a robotics engineer to participate. Team FREDNET , the first open source competitor, is open for anyone to join.

While the concept of open source has resonated around the world and beyond, there is still much education to be done. NASA and the ESA have made large quantities of their data open, but have yet to facilitate developer communities that allow for active contribution to the code rather than just feedback on finding bugs.

Spacehack.org , a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, was created for this reason, among others. Many of these projects are buried in old government websites or do not clearly communicate how someone can get involved. It is with great hope that it will not only encourage the creation of more participatory space projects, but also urge existing ones to embrace the social web.

Modern Perl code is different. The past decade has produced important new features and powerful new techniques for writing clear, concise, maintainable, and reusable Perl. These new developments build on each other to replace awkward, painful, or difficult to use correctly approaches with simple code.

Learn how to understand context, to embrace lexical scoping, to manage CPAN installations without pain, to perform pain-free automated testing, to embrace the CPAN development model, to adopt new features of Perl 5.10 and 5.12, and to take advantage of the Moose object system.

Thursday 3rd June 2010

XHP is a PHP extension which augments the syntax of the language such that XML document fragments become valid PHP expressions. It fits somewhere between a templating language and a programmatic UI library. XHP allows you to use PHP as a stricter templating engine and offers a very straightforward way of implementing reusable, extensible components. Facebook is increasingly using this technology across our web presence, include our home page, dashboards, and lite.facebook.com.

This session will cover: how XHP works; syntax of building simple, complex, and dynamic structures; and using XHP as building blocks that cater to your web apps. I'll include lessons Facebook has learned about moving quickly from concept to product using XHP.